While we wait for the Netanyahu games to begin, anticipating the resumption of Israel's building of homes on Palestinian land in the West Bank and East Jerusalem, the further emptying of the Jordan Valley of its remaining Palestinian villages, and the development of the future Apartheid state of Israel, it seems like a good time for people to take a look at the reality on the ground as far as the dwindling peace activist movement is concerned. Actually, the problem is its silence or lack of publicity. Here's some.
These photos were shared this morning by the British site, Bristol to Gaza showing a little of what the reality is in Palestine, or whatever is left of it today, August 4, 2010.
Once a venerable if checkered organization at the forefront of fighting bigotry in general and anti-Semitism in particular in the US and Europe, the Anti-Defamation League under Abe Foxman has stooped to a new low and essentially acknowledged its support of Islamophobia, prejudice against Muslims.
The Anti-Defamation League came out against Ground Zero Mosque. So much for religious tolerance.
....Democratic candidate for the Senate from Pennsylvania (Specter's seat).
Whether you call it the Israel Lobby or AIPAC (the American Israel Public Affairs Committee) or the Neocons, there's no question that as a result of Sestak's past criticisms of Israel, they are now an albatross around his neck. Check out this political ad paid for by a new (old) group of Washington pro-Israel Neocons just resurrected as the The Emergency Committee for Israel. If you ask whether Sestak is in the process of being AIPAC'ed just as Cynthia McKinney (D-Georgia) was several years ago, this time with the Neocons leading the way, it turns out to be a silly question. Of course. Watch the attack video just released by this Neocon group:
The dead can still speak through their writings. And no one's writings are more relevant to what is going on today in Netanyahu's Israel and the Palestinian territories than those of the late Tanya Reinhart.
Tanya Reinhart, a former Professor at Tel Aviv University, Utrecht University, and New York University, is now dead. But before her death, she established herself as one of the most insightful analyst/writers about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Her capacity to take apart historical agendas, to relate past to the present, and to deconstruct realities and get behind Israel's hasbara (propaganda) effort were widely appreciated by the public, as in her last book, The Road Map to Nowhere: Israel/Palestine Since 2003.
Just one day before Bibi Netanyahu took off for his meeting with Obama in Washington, DC, reports came out of the West Bank about the further ethnic cleansing of Palestinian families from the Jordan Valley. For years, Israeli armed forces deprived those families of water resources and the ability to subsist off their own lands, but now, the lands themselves are in question.
In successive announcements earlier this year, Netanyahu claimed that the Jordan Valley, along with East Jerusalem, the Jordan border region, and the settlement blocs, were not up for negotiation.
After his meeting with Obama, in front of the press, Netayahu refused to follow Obama by mentioning the two states solution as the road to peace. Instead, he voiced some ambiguous notions about what the Palestinians must do, since of course they are the impediment to peace, not the occupation and colonialism that has characterized the past 42 years of Israeli-Palestinian relations.
The journalist in question is Max Boot. Who is Max Boot and just how does he get access to high brass military personnel like David Petraeus?
Wikipedia describes Boot as....."a Senior Fellow at the ,Council on Foreign Relations a contributing editor to The Weekly Standard, a weekly columnist for the Los Angeles Times, and a regular contributor to other publications such as The Washington Post and The New York Times. He blogs for Commentary Magazine on its page Contentions. He serves as a consultant to the U.S. military and as a regular lecturer at U.S. military institutions such as the Army War College and the Command and General Staff College."
Right Web, a website which "tracks militarists' efforts to influence US foreign policy," however, writes this about Boot: "Max Boot is an award-winning writer who promotes militant U.S. security policies similar to those backed by Neoconservative writers like Charles Krauthammer and Michael Ledeen. Boot holds privileged perches in the U.S. news media and foreign policy communities.... An example of Boot's inflammatory writing style was his review of the "Goldstone Report," the UN investigation led by the South African jurist Richard Goldstone whose report was released n late 2009."
In short, Max Boot is a pro-Israel Neoconservative, and in this story, we have General Petreus answering to him on matters related to his recent comments concerning the fact that Israel's treatment of the Palestinians is endangering the lives of American soldiers in the field in Iraq and Afganistan.
In order to continue its colonization of the Palestinian territories (minus Gaza) or all of original Palestine, Israel must maintain a war footing, while casting itself as a victim of terrorism fighting for its very existence. In this deception, maintaining Hamas as its arch-enemy is an essential ingredient, perhaps its only red herring left to distract the world.
In this context, Noam Chomsky gets to the bottom of the Gaza Flotilla massacre and shows us what it was really all about.
Neoconservatism is often described as a right-wing political philosophy that emerged in the USA, and which supports using American economic and military power to bring liberalism, democracy, and human rights to other countries as necessary. Although neoconservatives claim to be liberal on economic issues, the right shift of this movement seems entirely based on its radical foreign policy. The Bush Doctrine, for example, is a often perceived as a Neoconservative project and the Iraq War an example of its implementation after 9/11.
However, according to Harvard professor Stephen Walt, the Neoconservative movement is not what it seems to be, but that it has always been an Israel-centric movement to involve the US in foreign adventures that seem advantageous to Israel, and not for the idealist purpose of spreading democracy around the world. In this regard, there is plenty of evidence that the trillion dollar Iraq war was engineered by Neocons situated in the Defense Department, that it was done for Israel's sake on falsified evidence of Saddam's WMDs and terrorist connections.
But Neocon influences did not end with Iraq, but went on to push for an attack on Iran, and then, now, Turkey, which is being singled out for its criticism of Israel based on recent events. As Walt put it, "the critic of my friend is my enemy," hence, the anti-Turkey focus of recent Neocon efforts to support Israel.
Richard Silverstein (Tikun Olam), after reviewing the geriatric makeup of the commission Israel assigned to investigate the Gaza Flotilla massacre, could only conclude that: "the fix is in." The average age of the panel is 85 years, at least some of participants being recruited from nursing homes. But that is not as damning as the well-known biases they carried through in their more lucid times.
The degree of polarization achieved within the American Jewish community by the topic of Israel was witnessed last weekend in San Francisco, when organizations of differing perspectives, peace activists from the Bay Area Women in Black and Jewish Voice for Peace, confronted members of StandWithUs/SF Voice for Israel. The peace activists were holding a silent vigil outside the main entrance to the San Francisco Jewish Community Federation while it was celebrating an annual event, "Israel in the Gardens." The StandWithUs group lined the street.
This titled text was attached to an article by Uri Avnery, founder of the Israeli peace group Gush Shalom, and distributed by Tikkun via email. The article itself is available at the Gush Shalom site. This attachment was written by ML Rosenberg, a frequent Huffington Post contributor, and exposes the lies now being propagated by the Israeli government, which are being circulated in the mainstream media in the US, and possibly Europe, filling peoples' minds with utter falsehoods about the flotilla attack, Hamas, and the dire situation in Gaza. (Sorry, the previous attribution was inccrrect.)
When BP did it, it was manslaughter--"depraved indifference", as any fan of Law & Order could tell you in their sleep. But when Israel attacked the Free Gaza flotilla this week, killing nine people, it was murder one.
There are no ifs, ands or buts, save in the minds of the Israel Self-Destruction Crowd, those who would cheerfully defend Israel's use of a nuclear weapon to wipe out all of Gaza, if it came to that. "Israel can do no wrong!" may appear to be their rallying cry, but "Israel has lost all sense of right and wrong, and damn proud of it!" is their actual rallying cry. When someone lights a match anywhere in Gaza, it's a mortal threat to Israel. If someone lights a match anywhere in Europe...it's probably a mortal threat, and best not to be too careful. For it can't be stressed too much at this point that Israel doesn't give a damn what anyone in Europe thinks of them. America, either, for that matter. All they really care about is Versailles.
Of course this means they have to mount a massive Goebbels-style attack on the American people, because they very well know how vast the gap is between Versailles and America on the subject of Israel's right to kill anyone they want to. But they don't really care what we think so much as they care about intimidating us. Preventing us from thinking--that's the all-important goal here.
Here's what Richard Falk, the UN special rapporteur for human rights in the Palestinian territories, and a giant in the field of international law and human rights (bibliography here) had to say on Democracy Now! on June 1:
AMY GOODMAN: This is Democracy Now!, democracynow.org, the War and Peace Report. I'm Amy Goodman with Anjali Kamat. We're in New Orleans; our guests are around the world. We're going to turn right now to Richard Falk, the UN special rapporteur for human rights in the Palestinian territories.
This issue of international law, of international waters, Richard Falk, talk about your reaction to what took place. I had originally said on Sunday morning; in fact, it was 4:00 Monday morning on the waters, on the high seas, when the Israeli commandos raided the Gaza Freedom Flotilla.
RICHARD FALK: Good morning, Amy. This was a shocking incident that involved, as your other guests have said, a complete disregard of international law, in several respects. It was an act of naked aggression. It was done on the high seas. It was done in defiance of elementary humanitarian standards. It was known that this flotilla had no weapons. It was not a security issue by the remotest stretch of the imagination. If there was a right of self-defense, it belonged to the people onboard these ships. Israel, as the aggressing state and political actor, had no claim whatsoever of self-defense. It's an absurdity. And one can only imagine if another country that the United States didn't like had engaged in this kind of behavior, we would have been denouncing them or, worse, using force. One can only imagine what would happen if Iran had done something of this comparably outrageous character and sought to provide some kind of legal cover for it, while silencing those that actually experienced the incident.
Lawrence of Cyberia graciously provided an obituary on the nine Turkish peace activists who died on the Mavi Marmara, the lead ship in the Gaza Freedom Flotilla. They were all Turkish citizens. In retrospect, one can only imagine how they, like others aboard the flotilla, were affected by the Gaza massacre of December 2008, when Israel killed 1,400 Palestinians, especially the more than 300 children who died. The pictures were heartbreaking.
We all saw those pictures. Yet only a few of us, like those who died on the Mavi Marmara were inspired enough to act. So these now dead activists joined an humanitarian aid convoy. They ended up dying for their principles. In the terminology of Islam, they died martyrs.
